Calico bush

Calico Bush is a children's historical novel by the American writer Rachel Field, published in 1931 and illustrated by Allen Lewis.

Marguerite is French, an orphan, and bound to a family for a term of service, which means that her position in the household sits somewhere between a daughter and a hired hand. The novel runs from the summer of 1743 to the spring of 1744 on the Maine coast, and it is built out of the work of a settlement: the clearing, the planting, the fishing, the nursing, and the relations with the Penobscot people whose country this is. Marguerite's plain competence, and her willingness to act when the household is in danger, is what changes how she is regarded. Field spent her summers on Sutton Island off the Maine coast, and the book is named for the mountain laurel that grows there and for a ballad that is sung in it.

It was a Newbery Honor book in 1932, and several critics have thought it the author's best novel.